A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT MODEL TO IMPROVE THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUSHFIRE COMMUNICATION PRODUCTS

This paper brings together two bodies of literature around knowledge management (KM) as enterprise integration (EI) and organisational ontology and epistemology as philosophy, in order to develop an extended KM approach to the development of bushfire preparedness material in the Australian context. Knowledge Management (KM) in enterprise integration (EI) practice manifests as process-centric electronic document and records management solutions. Knowledge creation and organisational epistemology is viewed as a social process, but this is often left unrepresented by KM processes. The body of literature on KM tends to focus on organisational functionality and organisational KM that is based on EI ontology tends to be restricted by organisational functionality and process models. We argue that developing the KM-Model using subjectivist epistemology has a significant role in KM and organisational studies for emergency and disaster agencies. As part of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) ‘Effective Communication and Communities ’ project, bushfire communication materials were collected from all Australian States and Territories and analysed using NVivo